A Survey in Prose

Winters returned to his corner of the ARC lab to find a lightly stained folded paper on his desk. Confused, he unfolded it to find scrawling handwriting read:

“I apologize

I’m sorry sorry sorry

I apologize”

            Confused, he immediately took stock of the compact office with papers and other objects strewn about, and miraculously concluded that nothing had been stolen or broken. The letter was unsigned and in a barely legible handwriting he had not seen before. Fearing an already regretful intruder had entered his space, he looked to the only place not covered in the utter garbage he called work – up. Upon realizing no one was lurking in the shadows, he concluded that the woeful author must have been the Xero he had bumped into on his way back from reading the new ARC survey released that morning.

            The blustering Xero he knew to be called Whiskey, this name he solely learned because couriers often saw the “W”, “I” and “S” in the piebald Xero’s name and handed letters penned to “Whiskey” off to Winters instead. Winters could only imagine how many important documents had gone to the other Xero, only to be lost to time, as he had never gone to Winters’s end of the lab to return lost mail. Winters had run into him, no, Whiskey had run into Winters earlier that afternoon, knocking the neatly stacked research papers out of his arms.

“Watch it, this was organized!” Winters yelped, among other less than kind words, but the Xero kept going by. Winters spent no time reorganizing the papers, as they were in fact, not organized before their tumble.

Evidently, Whiskey had learned Winters’s name, and knew where he worked, otherwise there is no way this letter could have reached his desk. Winters was amazed that he had bothered to apologize, though, the writing style was quite odd. What was the point of such strange repetition?

Ah, of course. It was a haiku. Handwritten, but unsigned. A loveless letter to no one as the ARC survey Whiskey was surely bumbling off to read about, and see that poems were so kindly suggested by lead staff. Not that Winters wanted or expected love or letters from co-workers. Nevertheless, Whiskey had taken time to at least apologize for his mistake, and thus, Winters slid open a filing cabinet and dropped the letter into a manila folder labeled “Personal”.

Winters thought about the survey himself as he organized his area. He wasn’t known for being neat, but this newly inherited office space and projects were less than organized. Actually, it often seemed as though the previous owner had created this mess on purpose; leaving their half-baked ideas and abandoned projects in other employees’ labs, creating a burden for him to gather the pieces. He began picking at some of the mess while he thought about the ARC survey further. He sat and thought, what could he write about? Surely there was a photocopy of the apology note already handed over to ARC lab, so he could not steal that to be his own. He sat, before writing:

“I have been bumped and prodded

Beaten and scorn’d

By these papers, that by the daily

I wish I had torn

This research disorganized by a loser

Along my horrid and treacherous walks

I have been bumped by a boozer

Or at least alcohol is in his name

New projects to be found

By my assistants in other labs

With new research abound

In this sick and twisted scavenger hunt”

            Winters cocked his head sideways like a confused animal, as if turning his head would somehow improve the poem he had just penned. With a sigh, he ran off once again to hand in his work, before returning to the never-ending clutter.